By Dr. John Christopher

Natural food should be eaten in moderation and in simplicity. The fruits are especially good for cleansing the system after your night’s fast during sleep and it will satisfy the need and craving for sweetness. The green herbs of the garden, used fresh and tender in salads and chewed well, will build strength and vitality into the body tissues. The bulbs, roots, and starches in grains will provide fire and heat for the body, but these should be eaten only as needed for the more strenuous physical labors. The sprouted seeds are nourishing tonics to restore the body constitution and in resisting ill health. The nuts of the trees will provide the nutrient “meat” (protein) for man and will season other foods. The culinary herbs will provide variety, flavor, and seasoning as nutritional agents. And in the whole of your daily activities, you must achieve a varied and harmoniously-blended whole: fresh air, sunshine, exercise, work play, song, prayer, reading, meditation, recreation, etc.

FASTING

The “no breakfast” procedure:

So many times you will hear people say, “But breakfast is my main meal; start the day with a big breakfast and you start the day off right.” This “big breakfast” idea is pushed hard by the breakfast-food, egg, milk, and coffee merchants, and some of their advertising plays on emotional fears. But this is so wrong, as better health is found in countries where people have the custom of not eating breakfast, except maybe a warm cup of liquid, and the first meal of the day is eaten at noon. And there are places where the evening meal is the first and only one, as the partaking of food is considered a privilege only after the work has been done and the right to eat is earned. So as you try the “no breakfast” experiment, the first few days may be a little rough, with headaches, light-headedness, grumpiness, etc.  This will only last a few days and you will see great improvement in health. There are many that champion the fast as a cure for anything and everything, or that fruit alone will answer your health problems, or juice therapy alone, or all raw fruits and vegetables. But in your properly-balanced program, some of the food will be raw, while some of it will be steamed, baked or low-heated.

A bodily famine is not required:

Periodic fasting is good to cleanse the body, but a bodily famine is not required as a sacrifice for cleansing. A cross-country runner would be committing suicide to make a grueling competitive twenty or thirty mile run without preparation and so it is with the fast; a person must work up gradually to the longer fasts.

MEAT AND ANIMAL PROTEIN

All animated life can only live in health on vegetation of some type. Some of the birds, animals and men live on the carcasses of other higher animal life, but these carcasses are ones that have received their health and vitality from vegetation. This is second-hand or secondary food that has lost a lot of its value, but it still has some nutrient value in it that can be traced back to the original or primary food source in the vegetation. The bird that eats the insect gets its real food value from the tree, plant or shrub that the insect has fed on, and not from the insect itself.

You are culturally conditioned to believe that meat and milk are an absolute dietary necessity, and you react almost without thought: “Yes, but what about protein? We need the protein so badly, and we will wither up and die without sufficient amounts of it.” And where do most of our people go to get their main source of protein? From the lower animal kingdom, steaks from the carcasses of slaughtered animals. And where does the meat-providing cow obtain its protein? From eating grass. The only value in meat is what the particular animal has received from eating green herbs.